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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
The day JFK was shot, a living James Joyce would have been eighty-one. The idea is not unthinkable. When Ezra Pound died, men had walked on the moon and the Beatles were pursuing solo careers. But Joyce never entered the image-repertoire of that later world. His life would remain definitive of an earlier landscape. His death, hard by those of W. B. Yeats (1939) and Virginia Woolf (1941), helps us to believe we know where to draw modernism's black border.
Yet there is so much post-war Joyce: more post-war than pre-war. If Joyce had a full life, his afterlife overflows. He seems to have turned up everywhere, on multiple continents, in countless cities. In his physical absence, his presence as idea, image, generative text, has only enlarged. A prevalent image for this is ghostliness. Seamus Heaney and Jacques Derrida have both talked of Joyce this way. Still, the ghost does not seem quite the right figure for Joyce's afterlife. It is too evanescent, wayward, elusive. Post-war Joyce has been not a fleeting spirit but a relentless resident. He has taken over careers, conferences, departments, budgets, publishers’ lists. If an ethereal image fits the Joyce Industry, it is not the slippery, solitary spook, but the heavenly bureaucracy envisaged in Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946), in which squadrons of angels track the credentials of new arrivals. It is the beginnings of this edifice that this essay will describe.
PLANETARY DISTANCES
Post-war Joyce begins with wartime Joyce. For the first enduring academic book was written in 1941.
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